Windows

Santa Fe Mysteries: The Elk Moon Murder

Elk Moon is not intended to keep an audience of hardcore gaming detectives enthralled for weeks on end. Rather, it is meant to be played through, in a relatively brief amount of time, by a more general audience looking for a good story with some mild brain teasers - a task it accomplishes quite nicely.

Wow! Lichtjahre trennen "The Elk Moon Murder" von der Affäre Morlov. Die heiße, staubige Atmospähre von Santa Fe kommt prächtig rüber und läßt das Adventurer-Herz höher schlagen. Die Geschichte um die ermordete Anna Elk Moon ist äußerst stimmungsvoll und professionell in Szene gesetzt worden.

Even if you do solve The Elk Moon Murder the first time around, you're bound to be amazed at the richness of the setting, the fine acting, and the sharp design. This is a high quality product, and it's bound to leave players hungry for the next installment of Activision's Santa Fe Mysteries. Stay tuned.

The Elk Moon Murder is a race against time and nasty surprises set up to trip up unsuspecting adventurers by the game's creators. The game is technically very well made but calling it an adventure game is probably not appropriate due to the lack of puzzles. The game's story is not uninteresting, although it is perhaps a little too complex and it's not easy to keep track of who's who, especially at the beginning.

As I said earlier I was really looking forward to enjoying an absorbing murder mystery and although The Elk Moon Murder had potential it never quite lived up to its early promise. Had it not been for the annoying time limit I could have heartily recommended this to all murder mystery fans but, as it is, be aware you could finish it in a few hours if you happen to hit on the correct leads.

As a first-person adventure, The Elk Moon Murder indulges our secret desire to play police detective for the day. While lacking the glamour of NYPD, players can expect to encounter a traditional plot filled with eccentric locals, numerous suspects and enough red herrings to feed a small feral cat population. In the wake of Anna Elk Moon’s murder you are assigned to catch the killer by examining the crime scene, interviewing suspects and checking alibis. Between tangled-love affairs, ex-husbands and the theft of a rare and valuable artefact, it seems that everyone had a reason to murder the ill-fated Elk Moon.

Despite its noble stab at multiculturalism and its refreshingly nonfuturistic plot, this game is as flat as a tortilla, offering as its sole attractions a neat virtual map of Santa Fe and an atmospheric soundtrack by Tim May (who played guitar on the theme to Melrose Place). Elk Moon was cocreated by Northern Exposure writer and producer Sam Egan, who's apparently more suited to Alaska's frozen tundra than to the vast, ethnically diverse American Southwest. The game's tag line reads, ''Fear the desert,'' but what I really fear is that CD-ROMs like this are replicating cable TV's more arid terrain.

TEMM is an interactive murder mystery that could use a lot more mystery. Go buy a five-dollar paperback detective novel ... it'll probably take you longer to read the book than to solve this game.

Far too many gigabytes have been utilized in various media criticizing the use of Full Motion Video in computer games to be repeated again here. Suffice it to say that except for the odd titles have used it competently to enhance the ambiance and propel the storyline, Full Motion Video has never really found favor with hardcore gamers. Primary amongst the reasons is the forced linearity in gameplay that is intrinsic to the medium and the huge amounts of disk space (and consequently, disc swapping) that it involves. Santa Fe Mysteries: The Elk Moon Murder is such a title that illustrative this point. The game, which sprawls across 2 CDs, can be solved well within a few hours even by Joe Average. Of course, proponents of this technology say that it adds realism to the gaming experience by having live actors rather than sprites or rotoscoped animations. Then again, if I want to see reality, I rather watch CNN or visit Ethiopia!